Slashdot Mirror
Car Produced With a 3D Printer
Lanxon writes "A prototype for an electric vehicle — code named Urbee — is the first to have its entire body built with a 3D printer, reports Wired. Stratasys and Winnipeg engineering group Kor Ecologic have partnered to create the electric/liquid fuel hybrid, which can deliver more than 200 miles per gallon on the motorway and 100 miles per gallon in the city."
Somebody call in BBC Top Gear rubbish creation team.
That's all well and good but I bet all that folded paper won't hold up too well in the rain.
You wouldn't steal a car.
But would you download one?
I wrote parts of this stuff
...to double as an eco-friendly coffin.
Looks very cool, just don't know what would happen during a high speed crash. Maybe it would bounce off the other cars and land safely in the distance?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Maybe they have some nice new tech, but the 3D printers I have seen produce stuff that is not well finished. The resolution just is not near perfect, you can see and feel little bumps and ridges.
And how have they scaled it up? You only do this stuff for prototype, not production due to cost.
However, you can make "impossible" shapes. That can be pretty cool.
why does the picture in the article look like a still from a low rez video of a photograph of a badly-photoshopped computer rendering?
i could live a little longer in this prison
With all this green technology promised to us, I wonder if there is consumer demand. Look at the 1980s: after the government regulations that gave us crappy front wheel drive cars, consumers switched to large gas-guzzling SUVs (I wonder if fuel efficiency would have stayed better if we still had the large RWD sedan layout, with our current engine improvements).
The truth is, no-one wants a slow, cramped and wimpy go-kart (except for some hippies). People want a practical and fun car. If you force these shopping carts on us, we will just start buying more light trucks (eww).
How much do the printer cartridges cost (and how many would it take to print a car)??
I'd love to see 3D printers become more common and affordable, and see open source move to physical objects (like an open-source car!)
[nt]
The two-passenger hybrid aims to be fuel efficient, easy to repair, safe to drive and inexpensive to own.
Nothing about that picture, from the low driver orientation to the tin-can size, exudes safety.
Even the picture from their homepage looks horrible.
I want one of those printers. I hear that I can order one from Yemen, but for some reason I'll have to pick it up at the local Synagogue.
mod parent insightful! It's true
So it's a 3D printer? Can it print a Klein bottle? If not, I'm not buying one.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
As a threat to interstate commerce? Kinda like telling the farmers they can't grow their own animal feed? If you think that self publishing artists are a threat to the industry, wait until you have everybody self replicating everything they need.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Now, some enterprising person could build a car body from scratch and truly verify if Adam and Jaime got it right.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
OK, so they're printing these bodies, right? Hence, they could have had at their disposal a vast array of CAD software, right? Hence, they could have easily come up with a half good design, right?
But they clearly didn't. Why?
If I were half as smart as these people seem to be, I'd present more and better pictures of the result and I would attempt to come up with something pleasing to the eye. There seem to be one or two images of this car on the Internet that indicate they are very insecure about the aesthetics. My take is it is a tricycle and that it looks like shit. I also seriously doubt if ever a printer will outproduce a mould.
This technology will however be great for prototyping car bodies. Maybe, some day, even Japanese, Korean and Chinese cars will be designed to look half nice instead of bloody awful.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
It will be interesting to see what unions have to say about this innovation. Clay body knockers are union members and this would effectively eliminate many their jobs.
Every time I read one of these negative kinds of responses to these new, super-small, super-efficient vehicle alternatives about how unsafe they are going to be, I can't help but think that the poster is missing the point.
Yes, compared to vehicles commonly available today, these will probably be structurally inferior.
But these vehicles are for the future. In the future, probably the near future, many people are going to be choosing between going to work on foot or a bicycle, because they won't be able to afford to drive any of the vehicles commonly available today.
Compared to going on foot or a bicycle, these kinds of cars are just fine.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
A few weeks ago I had my 3D printer make another 3D printer that was fully functioning. To prove it I had it make another 3D printer, and it worked. I thought that was soooo awesome! All of my friends were pretty impressed, too. The odd thing was that third printer never seemed to work the same way, it never seemed to really stop working. Later that week a guy at the office "borrowed" the dang thing. It took me several days to get it back, and later I realized it wasn't event the same one. This one was somehow able to make another 3D printer using various materials lying around my office. It actually created another 3D printer using a desk lamp and part of laptop, and a second 3D printer from part of my desk. I didn't want anyone to see the damage so I kept the door closed after that. Then last Monday I knew there was real trouble when I realized there were 3D printers in the neighboring offices and a large hole in the exterior wall. On Friday our company then sent out a warning that vandals have destroyed several vehicles in the motor pool, but I knew what was going on. I’m at a loss. How do I stop this thing? I don’t even know how far it’s spread.
I'm looking forward to the time when thepiratebay will have the latest sports car for download.
On a serious note, 3D printing could kill the physical product industry. Will there be DRM on car blueprints? Hm.
...you just crumble your ride to dust on arrival.
Two links for videos of fixing something at home with a 3D printer:
"YouTube - Better Living With MakerBot - Episode 1: Kitchen Lamp"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBzyZSVK_Gs
"Better Living with MakerBot - Episode 2: The Wall Socket "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9tnqHS2vFo
You could recycle plastic you already have with better home technology, in theory. Just like you can build a machine shop from "scrap":
http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/index.html
What does it mean to say it is "cheaper" to mass produce things than print them on demand if you need to incur costs when you store them, ship them around, wait for them, secure them, deal with sending back wrong orders, keep track of stuff, and still need to repair and replace stuff on demand anyway? If that made sense, why do people have 2D printers at home when it is probably "cheaper" in some sense to print everything at a large central facility and have it mailed to you in boxes once a month?
If your 3D printer breaks, you ask your friend to print you a replacement part. Or you use another 3D printer you have at home. What do you do when you misconfigure a Debian system and it won't boot? You use another computer to surf the web looking for a solution and to create a boot CD-ROM or boot USB Flash drive.
Anyway, maybe it is good that it is "just a hobby" (even as that is not quite true), because 3D printers are part of ushering in "the end of work (as we know it)".
Related group I'm involved with:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Consider the price of toner, wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a conventionally assembled car?
Well, I think transcending irony is the most important issue. :-) ... irony. :-)"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially
But copyright might come second? :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.misc.discuss/msg/1e499c6db59117a2?hl=en&
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Mix it with this http://tiny.cc/3kilo and let the apocalypse begin...
All there are are 2 front view horrible pictures. I can barely tell what I'm looking at.
When can I buy it??
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I'm reminded of the Slashdot article about the robot made out of Legos which solves a Rubik's Cube in 12 seconds. Of course, one of the components to this robot is a computer and the computer is not built out of Legos. This is no more a car produced with a 3D printer than that was a robot made out of Legos.
But the the headline "Parts of Car which it is Possible for 3D Printers to Produce, Produced With a 3D Printer" doesn't have that same ring to it.
The image shown in TFA is fake. An exceptionally bad one btw., I'd do a much better job.
The car shown further down the linktrail is a small model with a second class model paint job. It's photographed at an angle as to hide the fact. The model probably _is_ printed with a 3D printer and painted afterwards. I doubt one could print entire bodyparts of a car with rapid prototyping without running into serious size, stability and/or cost issues. Printing negative moulds for small parts, or the small parts themselves might be feasable, but full scale bodywork is done at a fraction of the cost and way more faster and stable with molds, fiberglass compound and a spraygun.
Bottom line: Crappy fake article with false claims (aka lies) about a bullshit press release about some crappy fake vaporware product that will never see the light posted after near non-existant reviewing by a slashdot editor. So generally business as usual. Nothing to see here, move along.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Looks like it was printed on an Epson.
"Yes, I have a Disaster Recovery Plan. It's called my Resume"
Could someone make a drawing for my reprap (http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page)
The car in the picture isn't a real car, so are they trying to give us an idea of what it is going to look like or are they trying to make us believe that this is the real thing.
Really really bad PS job. Without real pictures, is this a story at all? Where is the actual prototype? Who's smoking crack here?
I'm tired in the EXTREME of "new" car designs being touted as "100mpg" or "200mpg" as if it were something remarkable or fantastic...then finding the car is basically a plastic shell on a tricycle frame. 3 wheels means the vehicle is licensed as a motorcycle, not a car, so the typical safety requirements don't count. It's EASY as hell to design and even build, a high mileage vehicle when you get to ignore all the things that are dragging down MPG on traditional cars...things like pollution control, crumple zones, air bags, even bare minimum crash safety.
Build (not propose) something with 4 wheels, is street legal, that gets 100mpg, and I'll listen...until then this is just noise.
It would be amusing if the 3D printers actually had a reasonable pricing structure such that, when tolerances became fine enough, it would be cheaper to print out a plastic sheet with the "ink" actually embedded in the sheet. After all, if you need to be able to print out large physical objects at a reasonable cost then a thin sheet of plastic would have to be just a fraction of the price. Wouldn't that just ruin the day for all the companies that manufacture regular ink cartridges?
:)
And suddenly i'm reminded of the plastic "flimsies" used in the Vorkosigan universe instead of paper
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
What's going to collapse civilization is litigation. Everything is going to be illegal, or we will all be lawless.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
"Car Produced With a 3D Printer"
Cars are very rarely produced. I cannot produce a car at all. Some magicians can produce cars but that is only an illusion. The correct word would be 'manufactured' or 'constructed' or even 'built'.
When you use the preposition 'with' in a sentence along with the verb 'Produce' (past tense 'Produced') it means that the subject (in this case 'car') has one or more of whatever is the subject of the prepositional phrase (in this case 'a 3D Printer').
Essentially what you have written is that a car was somehow made to appear and that the car had a 3D printer that somehow was connected, attached, or in residence with it.
I think you meant the following.
"Car MANUFACTURED USING a 3D Printer"
Nit picking? Sure. Is English your native language? Doesn't sound like it.
Yesterday there was a story about how advanced math was very important and that it needed to be taught to all high school students. I disagree. I think advanced English should be required. After all everyone in the United States should be fluent in their own native tongue.
Just a thought.
Or, the could park it anywhere in the midwest, outside, for a summer, and it's guaranteed to get hail damage! Instant golfball car + added MPG = WIN!
I thought they meant that the car had a 3D printer built into it. I was wondering why anybody would want that...
This makes much more sense...
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
There's a typo--it's not an Urbee, it's URIBE!!! GO GIA--oh, never mind, this is /. :-(
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
Exactly! And the next thing you know the RIAA will be cracking down on people pirating cars over torrents and printing them at home.
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
Civilization is not limited to US.
Just saying.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I don't want to downplay the achievement here: the building of an entire autobody using a 3D printer is an impressive feat. However, there is still the question of more sophisticated parts of the vehicle. How do you build components like the engine, transmission, and battery which are parts that require much more complex manufacturing processes and exotic materials? I understand you can fab simple circuitry with these printers, but can you but what about power supplies and microprocessors? These are all items that can require extremely high levels of quality control. While this technology can help localize some parts fabrication (say, a new panel at your local garage), you will still need the complex supply chains to manufacture these vehicles. Then the question is whether it is still more cost effective to assemble all these vehicles in a single plant that have the advantage of learning or ship parts to local assembly sites for specialized assembly. Don't run off and warm up your torrent clients in anticipation quite yet.
Sorry,
But Printing will never replace Molds, ever. That is just the physics of it. Printing is nice for mock ups, like something you need an an hour or less then a few days. But once the idea is solid, you build a mold. This car and ad, is a complete waste of time and will die out in a few months just like the million other aero car ideas. Get a real job!
True enough, but when you haven't left the country US civilization is still 100% of the civilization you *know*, or would refer to. leaving the country for a year or two wouldn't count.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Trust me, a regular American can live happily in many other different "civilizations" once his will have collapsed under the weight of legalausaurus rex (sed lex).
:) Not sure what "know" means when you put stars around it too.
Not sure what you mean about leaving US for a year or two. I must have spent only three weeks in USA in my whole life
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I am sure some business men will get together and make sure that 3D ink isn't much cheaper.
I don't think car makers will ever have much to worry about!
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-11/02/printed-car
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/11/02/1359248/Car-Produced-With-a-3D-Printer
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Except the USA has lots of nukes, plagues, military robots, computer viruses, and who knows what else that stand ready to defend US elite privileged scarcity-based litigious world view until the end -- or even after the end. So, no matter where you go in the world, US socioeconomic dogmatic religious policies (backed by the force of law) can have a big "impact". And since the USA's elite-tilted market economy is essentially though of as "God" by many (ignoring "the love of money is the root of all evil"?), whatever the USA does to promote or defend its version of "the market" and related laws is, by definition, "supremely good", even were it to mean the end of humanity. The USA has inched a little closer to that by reelecting a lot of economic conservatives just now.
By a Harvard University professor of Divinity: ..."
"The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation"
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
"A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar. Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of déjà vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies.
The slogan "Better dead than Red" is another example of this thinking in the 1950s and 1960s. So "Better dead than live in a world of prosperity for all" could perhaps be a new mantra of the USA in the 21st century when 3D printing and shared information make widespread abundance possible, but everyone does not want to accept the shift to a new paradigm? See also James P. Hogan's prescient sci-fi novel "Voyage from Yesteryear" about this theme.
3D printing might totally reshape our socioeconomic landscape in the next couple of decades. So, essentially, producing a car with 3D printing is a *religious* threat to the US social paradigm built around scarcity. And religious threats can cause all sorts of crazy things to happen. I can hope that saner heads prevail and that the scarcity ideologues eventually give in gracefully when they think about the benefits to their children and children's children of a world that works for everyone.
From Einstein, on religion:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source."
An interesting essay by someon
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
And the entire world is embracing the US litigating spirit.
Rethinking email
Unless it's raining. Or it's cold out. Or it's hot out.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.